Europe’s largest IT firm to scrap internal e-mail

Atos, Europe's largest IT services firm, will abandon the use of internal e- …

Atos, the largest IT services firm in Europe, is going to do away with internal e-mail. Atos CEO Thierry Breton says that only 15 percent of the 200 e-mails his staff receive on average are valuable, and that staff are wasting between 5 and 20 hours a week handling e-mail. Instead of e-mail, he wants staff to use instant messaging and other chat-like communications media.

Breton himself claims not to have sent a work e-mail for three years, saying that if staff want to communicate with him they can visit his office, call, or send a text message. The 56-year-old CEO explains, "e-mails cannot replace the spoken word."

Whether a switch away from e-mail for internal communication will actually improve staff productivity is less clear. Communication outside the company will still tend to use e-mail, so staff will still have to run an e-mail client and still be vulnerable to e-mail-based interruptions.

Moreover, research suggests that instant messaging and phone calls are just as disruptive to productivity as e-mail. The problem is not really e-mail; it's interruptions. Eighty-five percent of Atos' internal mail may be worthless, but ditching internal mail doesn't mean that employees will end their unproductive communication.

Switching from one kind of interruption to another doesn't solve the problem—and indeed, a conscientious, well thought-out e-mail that included a number of points or questions might be less of a distraction that a regular barrage of instant messages.

Of course, for Breton the decision to abandon internal e-mail was easier than it is for most: Breton has a secretary.

Well I think its kind of sad that a CEO has not sent a email to all of his employee's for 3 years. Not even a holiday wish or a news letter? While IM and Texting is good and effective. I still think email still has a place in the business world. This guy sounds like he does not like it so its time to make it go away. Kind of pulling a Steve Jobs I think.

Yeah, why would we want some crazy self-documenting way of communicating information. I am sure reconstructing specs from IM threads will be lots of fun after the "I never said that" or 'I didn't have that understanding"

An out-of-touch executive making key infrastructure decisions based upon his personal experiences?

Color me shocked.

Y U BEAT ME TO THIS BRAH.

You took the text right off of my keyboard.

Maybe he hasn't sent an e-mail to his employees because he just doesn't give a damn about his employees? He says they can just visit his office if they want to talk, but I'd be willing to bet money that they're just barely tolerated when they're there, and most of the employees are too afraid for their jobs to dare to it.

It's fairly easy for a CEO to be so out of touch with his employee base that he thinks he's doing a good job, but in reality he's one of the most disagreeable and disliked men in the company and the only reason he thinks he is is because nobody has the courage to say otherwise.

Yeah, why would we want some crazy self-documenting way of communicating information. I am sure reconstructing specs from IM threads will be lots of fun after the "I never said that" or 'I didn't have that understanding"

Exactly.

Besides e-mail is much less disruptive than IM or phone calls. IM or calls demand immediate attention and interrupt the work. E-mail you can ignore for a few hours until you have enough time to go through the inbox and reply.

Perhaps the sysadmins were tired of sending out YOUR INBOX IS FULL e-mails because people use it as some kind of warped ad-hoc version control system with .doc files going to 20 people, returning with 20 replies containing corrections and annotations.

But what e-mail is great for is CYA. You document dutifully that some PHB gave you the express order to do (stupid thing), and when the excrement hits the propeller, you can point to the mails as evidence that the PHB was being stupid, not you. Spoken word alone only works if you have people who keep it.

At my workplace, I'll occasionally get interrupted by a phone call or personal visit, and depending on the person or the issue, sometimes those conversations can take up to half an hour! With email, I can bang out a reply on the keyboard in just a few seconds, and if there is need for follow up, then maybe a few more seconds.

I enjoy the personal interaction (most of the time), but from a productivity standpoint I have to ask what is this guy smoking?

Well I think its kind of sad that a CEO has not sent a email to all of his employee's for 3 years. Not even a holiday wish or a news letter? While IM and Texting is good and effective. I still think email still has a place in the business world. This guy sounds like he does not like it so its time to make it go away. Kind of pulling a Steve Jobs I think.

Instant message and an internal company blog/wiki would handle these two easily. Chat rooms could better handle group discussions than trying to manage emails between several people (which rarely works well). Most people here seem to be assuming it's a straight email for IM, but there are tonnes of communications tools out there that tend to work very well.

The real problem is that they're not handling email well to start with though, fixing it rather than removing would make more sense but I can see the net benefit here to just dumping it wholesale and using things less likely to be abused.

I'm a nurse, we get interrupted on average about every 10 minutes. I get maybe 5 work emails/day, none of which interrupt me. I whish some of the phonecalls and other interruptions I get were emails so I could deal with them when I'm not in the middle of something else.Under Breton I would apparently be interrupted every 9.5 minutes... yay for progress.

I assume you're joking but I always thought enterprise team communication would be an incredible use case for Wave. No more long threads of email with out of date information after things change, add people to the thread instantly, no one gets left off a reply-all, a singular timeline instead of branching replies... I played a little with one of my co-workers but we never could have done it as a whole team putting our data on Google's servers.

Truly moronic. Surely there is a need for recorded communication you can save and organise? Or are you just supposed to remember everything anyone every communicated to you verbatim up in your little brain?

1. Ask his secretary how many e-mails have been sent on this <insert insult>'s behalf.2. Someone mentioned blogs/wikis. There is an informal security with e-mail that has been built over the years basically don't send stuff to people you do not want seeing it that 'nearly' everyone understands. Blogs/wikis and web pages need a lot more security training and people will still bollocks it up.

Imagine an HR person using a blog/wiki to forward compensation numbers to payroll but not securing it correctly. Insert hilarity and hurt feelings. You know who gets fired? It won't be the HR person it will be an IT person.

Next he'll abandon using Word*, because he only uses fifteen percent of the features so what's the point of having the other eighty-five? Besides, documents cannot replace the "spoken word" - especially when you're trying to ditch evidentiary chains, at least.

>_O

Email can certainly be an interruption. So can IM. So can phone calls, text messages, and human beings. These can all be managed in similar ways so they are not distractions - so what is this nimrod's point again?

Yeah, why would we want some crazy self-documenting way of communicating information. I am sure reconstructing specs from IM threads will be lots of fun after the "I never said that" or 'I didn't have that understanding"

This is the first thing I thought of. That guy seriously must not be doing any real work if he thinks e-mail is less productive than the spoken word.

Is he seriously arguing that e-mail is *more* disruptive than IM or phone calls? I can't think of anything more disruptive to my train of thought than a phone call or someone walking into my office.

Brilliant! I mean that in a sincere way and unethical tone. No email means you don't have an email trail. True, chat can keep logs....if you turn it on. OOOHHHh your Honor, you mean we can't just chat off the record all the time? Well, we have our other records, the ones we typed out in word and printed for you.

Yea, stupid like a fox. That said, this will fly until someone points out that all the project communications are being saved in Word on a Sharepoint server, along with all the other project notes and documents.

As to the interruptions, um how to put this. If we did not live for interruptions, these forums would be blank.

An out-of-touch executive making key infrastructure decisions based upon his personal experiences?

Color me shocked.

Maybe for small to medium organizations. But for large organizations, email has become a major headache.

I work for a large research organization with 10,000+ at this site alone. It is not unusual to get 60 to 80 emails a day. On a good day, it is over 100. Most are about old Joe's retirement or Millie's class on how to safely repair your office toaster. Much of the email is from upper management about some new policy that applies to grounds or building maintenance or management (the server will be shut off between 2 and 3 am and the power will be recycled at 4 am). 95% of the important messages do not concern me.

So if I was 30 seconds opening an email, reading the first sentence and deciding to delete it, I've typically wasted 30 to 40 minutes a day. With overhead, G&A, etc, that's about $200. Multiplied by the 10,000 or so on this campus, that's 2 megabuck a day spent cleaning email.

Yes, there's an obvious solution. Just send the important emails to only those who have a need to receive it. Now just tell me how to convince the secretary in the xyz group that I don't need to know about old Joe's retirement since I have never worked with him.

Yeah, why would we want some crazy self-documenting way of communicating information. I am sure reconstructing specs from IM threads will be lots of fun after the "I never said that" or 'I didn't have that understanding"

Exactly.

Besides e-mail is much less disruptive than IM or phone calls. IM or calls demand immediate attention and interrupt the work. E-mail you can ignore for a few hours until you have enough time to go through the inbox and reply.

I would stagger it 3 levels.

Calls is drop everything and answer.

IM is can wait until i am done with current line of thought unless there is a rapid fire bunch of messages.

I don't see the attachment that most people have in this thread to email. If i received most of the messages i do through SMS\IM, it would be a quicker call to action then an email and if you don't want to respond then don't respond. Its not like you get an email and you can say, oh i didn't get that which is always a lie unless caught in the spam filter, everyone knows you got the email\sms. Its the same way with IM with your friends which you don't use email for.

Group discussions would be hell of a lot easier solution in a google wave-ish type software and sending documents can be achieved through ftp\shared directory\sharepoint solution. Plus for an email document trail compared to a unified chat log for internal use, I would give the advantage to a chat log similar to skype which you can also send files in the chat.